I admit I really like mayonnaise, but it HAS to be Best Foods or else.  When I found out I can’t have my mayonnaise as it contains sugar and I needed to make the homemade paleo stuff to be Whole30 compliant, well……hmmm…..not too happy.  But I promised to follow the program as strictly as possible for 30 days so I went online and tried making a few of the Whole30, paleo mayonnaise.  But they didn’t do well.  I tried a recipe that said to use the blender – but all I got was very thin salad dressing and it tasted way to0 strong of olives.  The second recipe I tried using a food processor and that one curdled and was not fixable even though there were instructions on how to salvage it when the mayo turns ugly, (mine was uglier than Frankenstein).

Then this morning I was watching the movie Julie and Julia (the one about Julia Child with Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci).  Towards the middle of the movie there is Julia memorializing the beauty of homemade mayonnaise and I thought why not see how I can adapt Julia Child’s recipe – that ought to be a good one.  To my surprise, Julia’s recipe is the exact same recipe all the Paleo people are promoting. Julia was obviously way ahead of her time and was making Paleo and healthy recipes without even realizing it.  Who knew!

I got out my copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and followed Julia’s recipe precisely, including pouring the olive oil by droplets, and not thin streams of olive oil –  yes you read that correctly, DROPLETS.  Course she also encourages you to make this a hand-beaten sauce, but does allow for the use of the electric mixer if you really have to – and I whipped out my Kitchen Aid mixer so quickly Julia would have been impressed at the speed.  When adding the olive oil I measured out my oil into 3 separate sessions, and scraped and folded the mayonnaise before starting to add droplets of the next 1/2 cup.  Here is a quick clip from the movie when Julia has mastered the art of chopping onions among other things while taking cooking lessons at Le Cordon Bleu.

Ingredients:

3 egg yolks

1 Tbl lemon juice

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp dry mustard

1-1/2 cups of olive oil (1 cup was original olive oil, and 1/2 cup extra light olive oil)

Preparation:

Warm your metal mixing bowl under warm water and then dry throughly.  Add the egg yolks and let them sit in the bowl for about 5 minutes before beating them for 1 to 2 minutes until they are thick and lemon colored.

Add the lemon juice (or wine vinegar if you prefer), salt, and dry mustard.  Beat for 30 seconds more.

The egg yolks are ready for you to add the oil, drop by drop, until the sauce has thickened.  I set my mixer at medium speed and measured out 1/2 cup at a time and then poured it in very, very, slowly.  Then I would stop the mixer and scrape the sides and fold the bottom sauce into the top, before starting to pour the next batch of olive oil.  Julia says “After 1/2 cup of oil has been incorporated, the sauce will thicken into a very heavy cream and the crisis is over.”  She was right.

Voila!

I had created home-made mayonnaise AND it tasted really GOOD.  Ran over to my sister’s house and made her try it, and she said, “Yep it tastes like mayonnaise!”   And here I thought getting healthy would be difficult – just not so!

Homemade mayonnaise

Yield: 2 to 2-1/2 cups of mayonnaise